The present invention relates generally to computerized accounting systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a computerized hospital bundled billing accounting system.
When a hospital patient requires long-term care (e.g., cancer patients, bone marrow transplant patients) and months of inpatient and outpatient treatment, the number of claims sent to the insurance company dramatically escalates; the number of bills and other pieces of paper that each entity (e.g., an insurance company, physicians' offices, hospitals, etc.) have to process becomes time and cost consuming.
Moreover, due to the number of entities participating in the treatment and care of patients, an accurate assessment of the overall cost for the services provided by all these entities is traditionally difficult to ascertain. Consequently, quotes provided by the hospitals to insurance companies can be inaccurate thereby resulting in hospitals losing money due to an underbid service contract with the insurance company or leading to an insurance company paying too much money for a particular course of treatment.
To these and other ends, the present invention is a computer-implemented method for aperiodically processing patient accounting data in a periodic hospital accounting database. Patient profile data is received which establishes activity criteria for grouping activities by a patient. Patient profile data is associated with a predetetermined bill drop criteria. A plurality of accounting data is received that is indicative of activities by a patient. For the accounting data that satisfies the activity criteria of the patient profile data, the following steps are performed: associating the satisfied accounting data with the patient profile data; and generating bill stay flags associated with the satisfied accounting data on the periodic hospital accounting database. The following steps are performed when the bill drop criteria of the patient profile data is satisfied: retrieving the patient accounting data that is associated with the patient profile data; and generating financial data based upon the retrieved patient accounting data.
For a more complete understanding of the invention, its objects and advantages, reference may be had to the following specification and to the accompanying drawings.